Russia on Wednesday cancelled the release of a Hollywood thriller set in the Stalin era on grounds it distorts history and would be shown as the country celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in WWII.
The film, “Child 44”, starring Tom Hardy, Vincent Cassel and Gary Oldman, tells the story of a serial killer who targets children in the Stalin era. It is based on a fantasy novel by British writer Tom Rob Smith and was due to premiere in Russia on Thursday.
Russia’s culture ministry said the film’s distributors in Russia, Central Partnership, had agreed to withdraw a request for a distribution licence after ministry officials viewed the film.
“Films such as ‘Child 44’ should not go out in our country on mass release, earning money from our cinema audiences, not in the year of the 70th anniversary of victory, not ever,” Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky wrote on the ministry’s website.
The move to effectively ban a major mainstream Hollywood film just a day before it was due to premiere was unprecedented.
In recent years, Russia has cracked down harshly on negative depictions of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, while criticism of those who fought in World War II is frowned upon.
The culture ministry accused the film of “distortion of historical facts and the idiosyncratic treatment of events before, during and after” World War II.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not the man to quote in support of the market economy. He was, after all, the president who gave America the assault on free-market capitalism known as the New Deal. He also capitulated to communism at Yalta, 70 years ago. There, in February of 1945, he and Winston Churchill met with Joseph Stalin, a genocidal butcher who dwarfed Adolf Hitler, to divvy up the world.
By the time the “Big Three” convened in the Crimean city, the region had long been subdued and decimated by the Bolsheviks. In November and December of 1920 alone, Crimea had been the site of a massacre of 50,000 souls. Kulaks, Cossacks, Ukrainians; priests, White Guards, socialists, nobles, Mensheviks and bourgeoisie: Entire groups had been branded as counterrevolutionaries-by-class, designated as sub-humans worthy of extermination. That is if the Reds’ revolutionary utopia was to come into being, which it did.
For simply being who they were or if caught talking out of turn, anyone in communist Russia could be made “a head shorter,” in Trotsky’s “delightful” turn-of-phrase.
Why, Roosevelt and Churchill had just missed the deportation, in 1944, of the Crimean Tartars. According to “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression”—that “800-page compendium of the crimes of communist regimes worldwide”— “of the 228,392 people deported from the Crimea, 44,887 had died after four years.” Still, the Anglo-American leaders saw fit to sit down with Stalin to “map out the postwar world,” ceding Eastern Europe to “Uncle Joe,” FDR’s affectionate moniker for the communist mass murderer.
In fairness, Churchill does not deserve to be lumped with FDR as an appeaser and enabler of ultimate evil. Churchill was avowedly anti-communist. He detested Stalin. For this very reason, FDR considered Churchill a “reactionary … an old incorrigible imperialist, incapable of understanding [Stalin’s] ideological idealism.” Against the wishes of Winston Churchill did Roosevelt agree to “give Stalin what was not his to give,” noted historian Paul Johnson, in his “History of The American People.” Churchill went along with FDR because he was desperate for American financial support.
Like many pseudo-intellectuals of his time, explained Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt was “grotesquely Stalinist.” Against all evidence to the contrary, he regarded the Soviet Union as a “peace loving democracy, with an earnest desire to better the conditions of the working peoples of the world.” As to FDR’s advisers in Moscow: They considered Stalin a benevolent, genial democrat. Indeed, “this monster, who was responsible for the death of 30 million of his own people,” was regarded by the American administration as “exceedingly wise and gentle.”
One can well understand why the medieval blood ties that tethered some Ukrainians to the Russians would have been severed by the criminal communist regime, which targeted the Ukrainian breadbasket with a vengeance. The communists robbed the Ukrainian peasants of their fertile farms, forced them into slave labor by corralling them into state-owned, collective farms, and systematically starved them by requisitioning most of their grain. The peasants had been left with a fraction of the amount of grain required to sustain life.
Yet these heroic, individualistic farmers rose up against the Reds.
The slogans of the Ukrainian peasantry, in 1919, were “Ukraine for the Ukrainians, down with the Bolsheviks and the Jews (whom they associated with the Bolsheviks), free enterprise, free trade.” Besides the standard mass executions, in order to wipe out this class of people, Stalin devised a diabolical man-made famine which killed up to 10 million.
Fast forward to Kiev, circa 2013, where Ukrainians tore down the statue of the founding father of Bolshevism and a mass murderer in his own right. But that man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, still reposes in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.
Why, pray tell?
President Roosevelt had his lucid moments. Or moment, rather.
According to Jonson, “When asked what single book he would put into the hands of a Russian communist, Roosevelt replied: ‘The Sears, Roebuck catalog.’” Sears, Roebuck was one of the great American companies which, through mass production and mass marketing, made available to America’s own Kulaks the luxuries that were previously enjoyed only by her rich.
Today, libertarians will often favor Russia in its dispute with Ukraine and the West. So where are those telltale signs of liberty we libertarians look for, when we throw our support behind this or the other side? And where, pray tell, are those “made in Russia” labels? Other than crude and commodities; Kalashnikovs (AK-47s) and Vodka —what does post-communist Russia peddle?
In this interview broadcast on Sunday 11 January 2015 with Dr. Dave Janda of WAAM, a radio station in Michigan, USA, Dr. Dan Roodt talks about the South African genocide and its relation to radical Marxism in the twentieth century. He also explains how rape in South Africa, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is use as a “weapon of war” to humiliate a whole group of people.
Joseph Stalin preferred the American Packard Twelve
The cars chosen by presidents, kings, prime ministers and other leaders of the world in the past and today, also reveal their tastes in foreign affairs.
The car fleet of the last Emperor of Russia Nicholas II in 1913 consisted of 29 vehicles and in 1917 there were 46. The Emperor’s main car was a French Delaunay-Belleville. It all ended badly for the ruler as well as the manufacturer, sadly.
When Vladimir Lenin became the leader of the Soviet Russia, strangely, he displayed a love of Western wheels, but apparently not ideology. In the 1920’s Lenin used a Rolls Royce 40/50 Silver Ghost and the only Rolls Royce-based sledge-car in the world.
Those discussions with Rolls about vast snowy landscapes with no roads for travel must have been long and interesting. Lenin famously erected the Gulags, similar to the concentration camps that the British invented in South Africa at the start of the 20th century.
Even more puzzling is that the next leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, preferred the American Packard Twelve. A man of slight stature, he stood very tall as one of history’s most prolific killers. But he may not have had the only responsibility.
Stalin’s grasp on the Soviet Union featured many atrocities, including purges, expulsions, forced displacements, imprisonment in labor camps, manufactured famines, torture and good old-fashioned acts of mass murder and massacres.
Actually, most of the deaths are today attributed to Lavrenti Beria, head of Stalin’s Checka, and amounted to some 20 million lives, on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War, for a total tally of 40 million. It was not called the Red Terror for nothing.
Both amoral psychopaths, acting like true gangsters, Stalin and Beria eliminated anyone and everyone who was a threat to their absolute power. Beria eventually killed his instrument of power (Stalin) too, new studies have shown, by poisoning him.
Chinese leader Mao Zedong had a Russian ZIS-110 which he got as a present from Stalin in 1949, although he managed to do a fair amount of killing himself.
Other Soviet leaders stuck with domestically produced cars. Nikita Khrushchev was driven in a ZIL-111 or a ZIL-111B convertible when he visited Berlin in 1960.
Leonid Brezhnev and the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were both driven around in a ZIL. The latter had up to 20 of those on each of his foreign visits. This required seven Il-76 transport planes.
Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin changed to an armoured ZIL-4105 when he became president in 1991. Later he changed it to a Mercedes S500 Pullman Guard (W140).
From then on German wheels seem to have prevailed. Russia’s current President Vladimir Putin is driven in a Mercedes S600 Pullman Guard (W-221).
John F. Kennedy, US president 1961-1963, used a Lincoln Continental. At the time of the assasination in Dallas, Texas, he was in a convertible Lincoln Continental SS-100-Х.
A man of the people, Uruguay’s acting President Jose Alberto Mujica spends almost all of his income on charity and his most expensive belonging is a powder blue VW Beetle, circa 1987.
No rattling along country roads for POTUS to meet fellow Americans, though. US President Barack Obama is transported in the armoured Cadillac One, also known as The Beast. The Bama took no cues from the Batman, clearly. His motorcade counts up to 40 vehicles transported on three Boeing С-17 Globemaster military transport planes.
British Queen Elizabeth sticks to the Bentley State Limousine, created in two copies specially for her in 2002 and British Prime Minister David Cameron still uses a Jaguar XJ X351 which he damaged in a road accident.
French President Francois Hollande changed from an armoured Renault Vel Satis to a Citroen and German Chancellor Angela Merkel drives an armoured Audi A8 L Security. She also has a BMW 760 Li E67 and a Mercedes-Benz S600 Guard V221 at her disposal.
Spain’s new King Felipe has English tastes. He prefers a Rolls Royce.
Few outsiders understand the ethnic dynamics of South Africa. Foreign journalists come here and imagine that we are some kind of remake of the USA, transposing American ethnic categories (and Hollywood movies) onto us. Of course, many people in Johannesburg and Cape Town imagine that they are living in America too, especially the mediocre crowd who have taken over our universities, describing the world in terms of “racism”, “whiteness”, “white privilege” and so on.
Race is undeniably a driving force in South African history, but not in the way that most people think. More fundamentally, one cannot understand our past and present upheavals without appreciating what Boerehaat, or “hatred of the Boers” is.
A week ago, an associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, David Saks, casually mentioned on the News24 website in a comment that there had been an underlying current of Boerehaat in the ranks of the anti-apartheid movement. When I was at university, many people in Johannesburg and at the University of the Witwatersrand were proud of their Boerehaat and of hating Afrikaners. It could even be seen as a sign of distinction.
In the early 1970s a cartoonist for the Wits campus newspaper, Franco Frescura, went out of his way to portray Afrikaners as oafish, unintelligent and ugly. He later became a lecturer in architecture. Although Frescura was of Italian origin, he has publicly denounced his “racist parents” and he was apparently strongly influenced by his English-speaking Johannesburg peers. Call this the “uitlander culture” of Johannesburg which goes right back to the discovery of gold in 1886 when hordes of British and Eastern European thugs had descended upon Johannesburg. The uitlanders’ visceral hatred of Kruger and the Transvaal Boers soon led to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
Franco Frescura actually has a website of his own where he describes his upbringing thus:
In Johannesburg Franco attended Houghton Primary and King Edward VII High School (KES) where, unbeknown to him, a number of the families with whom he came into contact had deep-seated links with the Communist and Liberal Parties.
He also proudly states in the same website biography:
Although Franco has gone down in student folk lore as the author of a well-known lampoon published on the cover of Wits Student in 1972 which featured a child looking into a lavatory asking the question “Excuse me, are you the prime minister?”, this is incorrect for the real author was a fellow student and co-activist who has since preferred to remain anonymous.
The South African prime minister at the time was B.J. Vorster, possibly the most popular white South African politician ever as he had managed to garner 65% of the vote and 80% of the seats during the 1977 elections. A golfer and reputedly a heavy drinker, with such tastes Vorster could almost have been described as an Englishman except that he spoke the language with a pronounced Afrikaans accent. However he did pander to English public opinion and famously discouraged Afrikaans language activists from pushing for more language equality by saying “it might upset our English-speaking voters”.
Why would Franco Frescura and so many others have held Vorster in such contempt, given his popularity with most English-speakers? The answer, of course, is to be found in David Saks’s statement: the anti-apartheid movement, as well as the South African Communist Party and ultra-liberals such as Mrs. Helen Suzman who represented the ultra-rich suburb of Houghton, were saturated with Boerehaat.
I would go much further than David Saks and state that South African communists were hardly ever motivated by love for blacks or black human rights. Instead, the driving force of the whole movement was ethnic hatred of gigantic proportions, directed against the Afrikaner people of South Africa. The current near-genocidal levels of violence as encountered in sadistic farm murders, suburban attacks, as wel as the country’s rape epidemic (more than a million women are raped every year, or about three thousand every day) have their roots in the Boerehaat movement. What unites both the gangs of anomic black killers torturing farmers to death and the more genteel haters sniffing out “Afrikaner racism” in mainstream media columns? Boerehaat pure and simple.
Except Boerehaat is not simple. Sure, most Afrikaners in this country have been exposed to English invective such as “rockspider”, “dumb Dutchman”, “bonehead”, “crunchie”, ‘white trash” and the like. But underlying it is a whole worldview, a psychosis well worth a Ph.D. thesis. Or several.
Jews are very touchy about anti-Semitism and most criticism of Jews is usually deflected as anti-Semtism. Even aspects of US foreign policy that could be construed as being detrimental to Israel are described as “anti-Semitic΅. For example, American senator Ron Paul has recently been accused of anti-Semitism by Ben Stein for criticising US bellicosity in the Middle East and the American occupation of Afghanistan.
Any cartoon or verbal caricature of Jews as being rich, greedy, devious people with hooked noses would immediately be denounced as anti-Semitic and in South Africa charges would no doubt be laid with the so-called Human Rights Commission. The Dieudonné affair in France is another case in point where the French government clamped down on the comedian and banned some of his shows for their anti-Semitic jokes.
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Caricaturing, stereotyping and even inciting hatred or genocide against Afrikaners do not carry the same weight, however. Communist Party members Nelson Mandela and Ronnie Kasrils sang their version of the “Kill the Boer” song which is all over YouTube, and it hardly dented the exemplary reputation that these two men, as well as their “comrade” Joe Slovo, enjoy in England, France, the USA and other Western countries.
Apart from Franco Frescura and his fellow cartoonist Zapiro, the list of proud Boerehaters in South Africa would be very long indeed. It would include author Nadine Gordimer, former editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Allister Sparks, as well as the newsrooms of many newspapers and radio stations, not to mention academic departments at universities where political correctness, Marxist ideology and Boerehaat are Siamese triplets. Probably the website The Daily Maverick is currently the flagbearer of Boerehaat ideas and attracts a particularly shrill kind of ultraliberal or left-wing inquisitor out to drive the final few nails in the Afrikaner coffin, sometimes literally when sadistic murders against Afrikaners are defended or minimised.
The German concentration camps of the Second World War are usually held up to be the prime example of genocide. We forget that the British – in order to further uitlander political and economic objectives – had introduced the concentration camp into South Africa where 30 000 Boer women and children died. But to understand contemporary Boerehaat and the excesses it might lead to, we have to look at the more left-wing instances of genocide that occurred during the twentieth century. There is the example of the Russian revolution during which Trotsky, Stalin and Beria killed millions of people or worked them to death in the gulags.
More recently, there is the case of the fanatical Khmer Rouge movement in Cambodia during the late seventies which blended ethnic hatred and communism to produce a particularly lethal cocktail. Just like in South Africa, there was a left-wing revolution in Cambodia with the ideal of constructing a millennarian society free of classes and races in a great “transformation”. Up to four million people were killed, many of whom were ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese.
When I lived in Paris, I had a Cambodian-Chinese neighbour whose mother was shot outside their house by the Khmer Rouge. That contributed to my increasingly critical sense when it came to left-wing revolutionary ideology. However, very much later I realised that he was telling me that his family had been victimised because they had been Chinese and not Khmer! When the race enemy and the class enemy coincide, that is when you get a particularly powerful incentive to genocide. In Cambodia the entire population was driven out of the cities, in order to effect the revolution and build “a new society”.
In an article entitled “Racial Communism: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge”, Eric D. Weitz writes:
“Someth May was a young Cambodian… [who] recalls… when a party cadre addressed a crowd [amidst deportation]: “As you all know, during the Lon Nol regime the Chinese were parasites on our nation. They cheated the government. They made money out of Cambodian farmers…. Now the High Revolutionary Committee wants to separate Chinese infiltrators from Cambodians, to watch the kind of tricks they get up to. The population of each village will be divided into a Chinese, a Vietnamese and a Cambodian section. So, if you are not Cambodian, stand up and leave the group. Remember that Chinese and Vietnamese look completely different from Cambodians.”…. Under the new regime, the Khmer Rouge declared, “there are to be no Chams or Chinese or Vietnamese. Everybody is to join the same, single, Khmer nationality…. [There is] only one religion – Khmer religion. Similarly, a survivor recalls a cadre saying: “Now we are making revolution. Everyone becomes a Khmer.””
Does that not sound familiar to us today, here in South Africa?
“Now we are making revolution. Everyone becomes a Khmer.”
Since 1994 we have seen equally fanatical attempts at so-called “nation-building” in South Africa whereby people have to adopt a new identity and “dissolve ethnically” into “the majority nation”. Those who refuse, or prove to be unassimilable or simply “different”, are then targeted, vilified and even killed.
I have previously remarked that in South Africa, “apartheid” is a simple metonym for “Afrikaner”. The racial, ethnic, linguistic, geographical and historical complexities of this society could hardly be subsumed under the globalised myth of “apartheid” as an evil neo-Nazi system of oppression. In that sense “apartheid” is meaningless, semantically empty. But to be anti-apartheid far more concretely means hating Afrikaners. Like Helen Suzman, the MP for Houghton, once said:
“I hate the Afrikaner. I hate his ways, his language and of course his politics.”
The fires of Boerehaat have not been extinguished by the Afrikaner leadership’s abject abdication from South African politics in 1994. On the contrary, Afrikaner powerlessness and seemingly masochistic obsequiousness in suffering vituperation on a daily basis have just added fuel to the fire. It has also led to pathological manifestations and internecine conflicts within the ranks of Afrikaners themselves. The phenomenon of the “self-hating Jew” has been replicated in South Africa with the self-hating Afrikaner, ever ready to heap opprobium on his own and to serve the cause of Afrikanerdom’s enemies. Many homosexual and lesbian Afrikaners, filled with rancour against the majority heterosexual members of their own tribe, have rallied to the cause of the anti-Afrikaner propaganda war that is raging to this day.
Up to 40% of journalists writing in Afrikaans today are apparently “gay”. Whatever their private lives, their opinions are far to the left of what ordinary people are thinking, so they are fast destroying what is left of Afrikaans journalism and newspapers by alienating their readers. In fact, the entire Naspers media group seems to have lurched into a “self-hating” orgy of white guilt and a kind of cultural death or ethnocide perpetrated against the very nation that had nurtured them financially for so long. Naspers represents nothing but a gigantic “psyops” operation aimed at the ultimate destruction of the Afrikaner people, their sense of identity, belonging and togetherness. Distributing Boerehaat invective, together with exalting nihilism, rancour and guilt feelings, all in Afrikaans, may be deemed more effective than simply overwhelming Afrikaners with propaganda in English.
According to the Boerehaat stereotype, Afrikaners are:
Of low intelligence
Ugly as sin
Rough, coarse and lacking in manners
Racist and anti-black
Women are fat and men have beer bellies
Ignorant and uncultivated
Given to incest and “in-breeding”
Afrikaans sounds ugly and “guttural”
In some respects, the Boerehaat caricature of Afrikaners corresponds to the Appalachian stereotypes in the USA. Combing through the production of South African English novels and films for such caricatures would be an easy, if tedious, task. Often in such publications, incest is presented as a metaphor for racial exclusivity, as in the supreme Boerehaat novel of the 1990s, Triomf, first written in Afrikaans by an Afrikaner lesbian, Marlene van Niekerk. Often Afrikaners who spend a lot of time on neo-Marxist, English campuses in South Africa would either have an identity crisis and commit suicide or they would actually become Boerehaters themselves, despising their own family, language and traditions to varying degrees. Although Van Niekerk apparently still writes poetry in Afrikaans, she has publicly called for violence against Afrikaners and abjured any sense of an Afrikaner identity.
The main character in her book is mentally retarded, the quintessential “dumb Dutchman”; both he and his brother sleep with their mother. In one scene he voyeuristically gazes thtough the hedge at the lesbian neighbours having sex and from the narrator’s point of view it represents a kind of higher world that he may only watch from a distance, being mired in mental retardation and ethnic exclusivity, which one supposes to be mutually linked in some way.
Although horribly vulgar, tedious and badly written, Triomf was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and translated into English. It was also made into a movie which was a complete box office flop but was again feted as a work of genius by the liberal press of Johannesburg, being “a true depiction of the Afrikaner psyche”.
During the Oscar Pistorius murder trial, the global media had a feeding frenzy, extolling on the natural propensity of Afrikaner men to abuse women and possibly even kill them. One of the ANC ministers, Lulu Xingwana, immediately diagnosed the Pistorius murder as a natural outcome of Afrikaner male chauvinism, saying to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
“Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it,” she said during the interview aired on Monday.”
Pistorius, despite his surname, was not even an Afrikaner and had been educated in English schools. But it was Boerehaat on a global scale in which the local uitlander journalists, or journalists infused with the Afrikaner-hating uitlander spirit, gleefully participated. To such an extent that even a self-hating Afrikaner “useful idiot” such as Max du Preez, to my great surprise, identified it correctly in his blog entry, Fifty Shades of Boerehaat:
“I can write a book about the downside of Afrikaner Calvinism, but hating or disrespecting women and children would not feature. The women in my family were and are strong, independent human beings whom all the men in the family love and respect deeply.” (See the whole blog comment underneath.)
Many Afrikaners have often wondered: Why do the people in Johannesburg and Cape Town, especially in the media, hate us so much that we are consistently misrepresented? In this cartoon by Zapiro, Afrikaans singer Steve Hofmeyr and author Annelie Botes are represented as dinosaurs from a bygone age (which, by definition, should already be dead or extinct). Note also the emphasis on their “small brains” or low intelligence.
Cartoon by Zapiro, alias Jonathan Shapiro
I hope the reader has by now formed an image in his mind as to what Boerehaat is. In most parts of the world, there are to be found what Freud called the “narcissicism of small differences”: Belgian jokes in Holland or in France, and so on. When such minor ethnic chauvinism degenerates into a social and political ideology, and is married to Marxist-revolutionary doctrine, we may well see the genesis of a Khmer Rouge movement or the potential for genocide.
Afrikaners are already the scapegoats for everything that goes wrong in South Africa. The lack of performance of other groups, even their corruption and profligacy in government, is routinely blamed on the Afrikaner.
Could Boerehaat discourse and societal breakdown as a result of social anarchy, crime and corruption lead to a bloodbath in South Africa, with Afrikaners being held responsible for every kind of failure, even while completely out of power?
And what causes Boerehaat? Why is it so persistent? These are questions I want to address in a second part of this column.
To be continued.
Max du Preez writes: Fifty Shades of Boerehaat?
The killing of Reeva Steenkamp by Oscar Pistorius has brought out the worst in people, from journalists to politicians to ordinary people. We read on the weekend (Mail & Guardian) that the problem with violence against women has a relationship to the macho rugby culture among white men; that Pistorius got treated differently because he was white and rich – what an insult to Magistrate Nair, one of the best in the country.
Now we have cabinet minister Lulu Xingwana saying to (of all places) Australian radio that the problem starts with Afrikaner men and their Calvinist upbringing who think all things, including women and children, belong to them to treat as they want.
I am a product of a Calvinist Christian-National Afrikaner upbringing of the extreme Free State platteland kind and not only am I a rugby fanatic, I played the game (not very well, though) from the age of six to well into my twenties.
I can write a book about the downside of Afrikaner Calvinism, but hating or disrespecting women and children would not feature. The women in my family were and are strong, independent human beings whom all the men in the family love and respect deeply. Whenever my father or uncles acted as if they were “the head of the family”, we all chuckled behind our hinds and said Ag shame.
Minister Xingwana should read the story (in my books Of Tricksters, Tyrants and Turncoats and Oor Krygers, Korrelkoppe en Konkelaars) of the wife of General Koos de la Rey, one of the most prominent patriarchs and Calvinist fundamentalists in Afrikaner history. Her name was Nonnie. She was not only the head of the rather big De la Rey family in every sense, her husband made very few decisions without her, even when he was a general in the Anglo Boer War. More than that: she stood up to the British generals who not only respected her, but actually feared her as much as they feared her husband’s military prowess. They knew: don’t mess with a stoere Boervrou.
(By the way, I wonder if Lulu realises that one of her own struggle icons, dominee Beyers Naude, was also a staunch Afrikaner Calvinist right to the end?)
The Soviet Union 50 years ago allowed publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s landmark account of life in the Stalin prison camps “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, shocking readers by revealing a hitherto hidden horror.
In November 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was looking for a powerful symbol that could help his risky campaign to expunge Stalin’s lasting impact on political and cultural life. He found it in a story by the then unknown author Solzhenitsyn.
The year before, Khrushchev had publicly denounced the late dictator’s crimes and ordered that his body be moved out of the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square. But he wanted to deliver another strong blow to critical conservatives in the Communist Party.
After a long hesitation, Khrushchev approved publication of the text, a story that was a one-day snapshot of a wrongfully-accused man’s life behind prison camp walls somewhere in the wind-swept plains of the vast country.
“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published on November 18, 1962 in Novy Mir, a prestigious literary monthly. The impact of this story, the first account of prison camps printed in the Soviet Union, was enormous.
“For us, Solzhenitsyn was like a comet that fell from the sky. This story was a huge event,” said literary critic Benedikt Sarnov.
The public fought over the magazine issue, thousands of readers wrote to the author and the editor, wanting to share their own stories, including former prisoners and relatives of people who had been deported or executed.
Solzhenitsyn wrote the story in 1959, drawing from his own experience of eight years in labour camps and prison after police intercepted his letter to a friend which criticised Stalin. He spent a large part of his sentence in the Ekibastuz camp in modern-day Kazakhstan.
“My father died in prison when I was five,” said Arseny Roginsky, a former dissident who now heads the Memorial rights group.
“What struck me in ‘Ivan Denisovich’ was that it talked about things that even my father’s friends talked about, including the ones that spent time in the camps.”
The story quickly rocketed Solzhenitsyn to international fame and was translated into many languages.
Khrushchev succeeded in his plan, and signs of a thaw were seen both domestically and from abroad, signalling a break from the Stalin era.
The thaw, however, was not a lasting one, and Khrushchev began to lean more towards the conservatives in just a few months. He declared the topic of prison camps “dangerous for society”, saying that Stalin’s mistakes should be pointed out along with his successes.
Publication of other prison camp accounts, such as Varlam Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” and Eugenia Ginzburg’s autobiography “Journey into the Whirlwind”, did not see the light until the perestroika period.
“If Khrushchev hadn’t attacked Stalin at precisely that moment, my story would have never been published,” Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, later wrote.
Khrushchev however could not predict that by enforcing his position against the Stalinists with the help of the story’s young author, he helped Solzhenitsyn to go on and write the Gulag Archipelago, the encyclopaedic narrative about repression under Lenin and Stalin.
“When One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first appeared, I was inundated with thousands of letters and testimonies,” Solzhenitsyn said in one interview.
“I began correspondence with the most interesting authors. I understood that fate was sending me exactly what I needed: material for writing Archipelago,” he added.
Once Khrushchev was succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, things changed drastically for Solzhenitsyn. “One Day” disappeared from libraries. Books were destroyed. In magazines, pages with the story were torn out, and the title and author’s name was blackened out in the table of contents.
Until the end of the Soviet era, the story, along with other works by Solzhenitsyn, could only be circulated via the dissident practice of samizdat, or self-publishing by hand or typewriter.
During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin in post-Soviet Russia, it became part of the official required school reading program, where it remains today. – AFP
This week South Africa, and seemingly the entire planet, celebrated Nelson Mandela’s birthday. Around Mandela a personality cult has been built that exceeds that of a Stalin, a Mao, a Kim Jong Il and a Hitler. In a global survey it was found that Mandela was a more famous brand than Coca-Cola.
The Soviet author A.O. Avdienko wrote the following:
“Thank you, Stalin. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well. No matter how old I become, I shall never forget how we received Stalin two days ago. centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, as the most fortunate of men, because we lived in the century of centuries, because we were privileged to see Stalin, our inspired leader. Yes, and we regard ourselves as the happiest of mortals because we are the
contemporaries of a man who never had an equal in world history.
“The men of all ages will call on thy name, which is strong, beautiful, wise and marvelous. Thy name is engraven on every factory, every machine, every place on the earth, and in the hearts of all men.
“Every time I have found myself in his presence I have been subjugated by his strength, his charm, his grandeur. I have experienced a great desire to sing, to cry out, to shout with joy and happiness. And now see me–me!–on the same platform where the Great Stalin stood a year ago. In what country, in what part of the world could such a thing happen.
“I write books. I am an author. All thanks to thee, O great educator, Stalin. I love a young woman with a renewed love and shall perpetuate myself in my children–all thanks to thee, great educator, Stalin. I shall be eternally happy and joyous, all thanks to thee, great educator, Stalin. Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country. And when the woman I love presents me with a child the first word it shall utter will be : Stalin.”
The consecration of Stalin as a kind of divine human, was supposed to overcome the ethnic and geographic divisions within the Soviet Union. The entire exercise was seen as necessary, as building unity and consensus in those days perhaps posed the biggest challenge to the Soviet government.
The end result was a cult of the “Great Leader”, a deliberate project to focus dedication and loyalty on the omnipotent leader, whose persona had to show the way in creating the ideal socialist man or woman out of the diverse ethnic groups that found themselves within the same territory.
The parallels with South Africa are obvious: a country of eleven official languages, tribes, races and religions grappling with the oft-repeated governmental wish of “nation building”.
Stalin was not the only “Big Leader” in history. Hitler and Mao were two other well-known examples of successful personalities that attained cult status, incarnating immense power. The tentacles and violations that resulted from such power, are also known today, unfortunately.
Political analysts believe that China’s present success is partially due to the dismantling or deconstruction of the Maoist personality cult which led to the Cultural Revolution.
In April 2003 a train in North Korea caught fire, with the fire spreading to nearby buildings. Several people died because they had tried to rescue portraits of their “Great Leader”, Kim Jong Il, from the flames. A few dubious pictures of the puffy dictator were saved while people, not photos, were consumed by the fire.
The familiar soap opera of the “Great Leader” greets every North Korean opening his daily newspaper over breakfast. If he is having breakfast at all, that is. For North Korean communism causes food shortages, like elsewhere.
To those who believe in slavery and the subjugation of people, cults of personality may make perfect sense. To the propagandists creating and maintaining such cults, so much more so. It is sometimes amusing to contemplate their ridiculousness, if it were not so tragic that people’s souls are stripped of all meaning.
In Togo and Turkmenistan there exists a similar devotion to the “Big Leader”. The Western media like to laugh at such grotesque celebrities, but strangely they do not practise introspection when it comes to their own “Great Leader”, Nelson Mandela.
He is presented as without blemish, without sin, the ideal man, the personification of the only political ideal worth aspiring to; he typically displays all the qualities of the “Great Leader”.
World leaders, the most influential among the influential, fell over each other in the Western media this week to confess their devotion to the Xhosa, to sing the praises of his political ideals and purity.
Worrying, to say the least. Never in history has a personality cult led to anything worthwhile. The smiling “Great Leader” has always brought death and destruction, as well as the worst misery and slavery.
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